'Everything was screwed up'

Former Army paratrooper Howard 'Bench' Hartman in his Hokendauqua home in May 2006.

Former Army paratrooper Howard 'Bench' Hartman in his Hokendauqua home in May 2006. (Morning Call file photo)

An interview by David VendittaOf The Morning Call

Howard "Bench" Hartman grew up in a family of 10 in Hokendauqua. He worked at the General Ribbon mill in Catasauqua and later at the Durable Pants factory in Northampton, pressing pants for the British army.

He joined the U.S. Army early in 1943, volunteering to be a paratrooper for the extra pay. In May 1944, he arrived in England, where he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division.

On the night of June 5, 1944, the 19-year-old private boarded a transport plane with other members of Company C, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment. They were headed for the Normandy coast of Nazi- occupied France.

On this 62nd anniversary of D-Day, Hartman, now 81 and still living in Hokendauqua, remembers his role in the Allied invasion that ultimately crushed Adolf Hitler's Germany.

You're in the plane with your parachute on. You get the red light, you stand up and hook up. You get the green light, out you go.

They jumped us low. I don't think we were getting flak. I know I only oscillated once or twice and then I hit. Somebody told me later on it was between 250 and 300 foot. So you fall 120 foot before your chute opens. At Fort Benning they used to jump us around 1,200 or 1,500 foot.

On the way over from England, we hit some flak and somebody says, "We must be over the Guernsey Islands." They told us we were going to go in the back way of Normandy, the Cherbourg peninsula. I don't know why they took that route. They knew the Germans were there.

Then we hit flak again. I prayed. Silent prayers.

You're scared every time you jump, and when you hit the ground, you want to do it again. Everybody that I talked to, and that I was in with, felt the same.

I carried an M-1 rifle. I never took no grenades with me. Hardly anybody did. We didn't want them going off. I had two or three cloth bandoliers of ammunition, a first-aid kit, three days of K rations, an entrenching tool, a gas mask, a jump knife, a couple of pairs of socks in my bag.

I didn't have my face smudged. Some of the crazy guys did that.

The invasion was supposed to be on the 5th. We were all in the marshaling area. Some planes took off, and then we seen them landing again, and they said it was called off for a day. We didn't know it was because of the weather. They didn't tell you nothing.

We went the next night. I jumped and landed in water about 2 or 3 foot high and I hurt my right foot. It was painful, but I was young and I could stand that stuff. I took the chute off, that's the first thing you do, and got out of the water. I didn't see anybody. I had no idea where I was.

There was a macadam road, trees and hedgerows.

Before the invasion they had like a sandbox to show us there was a little town we were supposed to take. It might have been Hiesville, five miles from Utah Beach. Well, I never even got close to it.

I didn't move all night, don't think I slept at all. I stayed by a tree where it was dry. I just stayed there till I'd find somebody. What else are you gonna do? There were a lot of guys like that.

I carried a "cricket" to use as a signal. The password was two clicks. Never had to use it.

At midmorning the next day, another guy with the 101st came down the road. We heard a motorcycle and jumped into a ditch, there were hedgerows there. It was a German. We let him pass.

Then we picked up a couple more guys. By that night we had three or four of us. They were 101st but from different companies, because everything was screwed up. Then the next day we started working ourselves up to where we heard all the shooting.

Well, we caught up with the outfit on the third or fourth day, when they were in the process of taking Carentan. I got involved in that a little bit, advancing with the outfit, but my foot was really bothering me. And on the fifth day, they said, "We're evacuating you." They took my boot off. You could almost actually see my foot swelling up.

There was a bone broken in my ankle.

They took me across the Channel in a small boat, to a hospital in England. I was there for two or three days, just staying off my foot. They didn't even put a cast on it. They told me it would heal on its own, and it did.

Then I went to a marshaling area where the 101st was getting replacements. I got a letter from Sam Blevins in Hokendauqua, who said my brother Frank was wounded in the invasion and was in a hospital in England. He was in the Medical Corps, 9th Infantry Division.

A lieutenant gave me two three-day passes, and I hitchhiked to go see my brother. I got to the hospital late at night, and a nurse said Frank Hartman was there and was probably sleeping. But he wasn't sleeping, so I went in to see him and he said, "What the hell are you doing here? Come back in the morning."

The next day I went in to see him. He got hit in both legs -- he had a nice chunk out of one leg -- and all his fingers on his left hand were shot off.

I told him I had a three-day pass, and he said, "Here's some pound notes. Go and have a good time, and I'll see you back home."

When he come home, the kids would say to him, "How'd you lose your fingers?" And he'd say, "I saved one of them." He had a little box with cotton and iodine in it and a hole in the bottom. He'd shove a finger from his right hand through the hole and show the kids.

Running and jumping

When I wrote to my mom from Fort Benning and told her I was in the paratroops, she wrote back, "Next thing they'll have you driving them airplanes."

The paratroops were all volunteers. That's why they called us crazy.

Our training was calisthenics -- pushups, pushups, give me 50 with one hand, all that stuff. But I tell you what, it pays off. That's why I believe I'm in good shape today.

At night, you learned how to pack a parachute, maybe till 11 o'clock. You were tired. The next morning, you ran. Every day in the paratroops except in combat, you ran five miles every morning. They'd get you up at 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock you'd go out and run, you're back at 7, at 8 o'clock, breakfast.

After that it was calisthenics, hand-to-hand combat, all that. They taught you how to tumble when you land. You'd have to jump off the sides of trucks going 35 mph. That's how fast you come down with a parachute.

The jump master was from Catty -- O'Neill, I think his name was. Training was five jumps; one's a night jump. I hurt my back on the night jump, landed in a tree. They had me in a hospital in whirlpools for a couple days.

In the Army, you never ate too much because they had your stomach shrunk. They never gave you much to eat.

When I come home from overseas, the band played up there in Camp Miles Standish, right outside of Boston, and a guy got up and thanked us for our service: "Now you can go in the mess hall and eat all the steaks and drink all the milk you want." I didn't eat much of a steak and had maybe a glass of milk. Nobody else, either. We were full.

They had your stomach shrunk.

Confounding a tank

Sept. 17, 1944. I remember taking off from England and thinking: The Allentown Fair starts today.

I took some motion sickness pills so I'd get some sleep. I thought to myself: I'm not gonna sweat this jump out. And the last thing I remember was going over the white cliffs of Dover. Then they woke me up. I was laying on the floor sleeping with a couple other guys.

We jumped into Holland. It wasn't screwed up like at Normandy. Our whole company landed in one field in the middle of the afternoon.

By Christmas, we were in Bastogne. I was never actually in the town, but on a hill nearby, at Chants.

It was a hectic day in January 1945 when I was wounded in Luxembourg.

A German tank got us. It's all pine trees up there in the Ardennes. And he come at us, and we were running around the tank and he was knocking the trees down with his barrel, trying to get us. He finally gave up, and he beat it.

It was just getting dark, and the snow was about a foot-and-a- half deep. They were hollering to me, "Hey, Hartman, you all right?" "Yeah, I'm all right." "Well, come over here to us, but watch yourself."

I get up and start running through the snow. BANG! Down I went. My left leg. I get up and start running again. BANG! Down again. My other leg. I thought: Son-of-a-bitching machine gun got me. It really knocked me down. I laid there.

They put me in a meat wagon, and who's in there but Mike Olesh from Allentown. He was a sergeant up in F Company. They kept putting lit cigarettes in my mouth, but I didn't smoke. They said, "Smoke it anyway, it'll relax you." But I didn't smoke it.

So they take me back to what they called an evac hospital. It was an Army truck backed up to a one-room schoolhouse. They operated in the truck, but they'd keep you in the schoolhouse. And that's when they told me, "You didn't get hit with a machine gun. That was shrapnel."

I was hit with mortars. Still got pieces of shrapnel coming up out of my left leg all the time. One time I was shaving, and a piece came out of my cheek.

They shipped me back to a hospital in England. Three months later, I caught up with the outfit in Germany, and the next day we got into one of them concentration camps. I don't know where it was. The 10th Armored Division went through the day before, but they never stopped. That's what they told us.

The camp was terrible. I don't want to talk about it.

A captain from the Medical Corps came and told us, "You've got to get it out of your minds. Try to forget it." But you can't.

They took us on trucks to Austria someplace, and they said we gotta take Berchtesgaden, Hitler's place in the Alps. They said there's 3,500 SS troops down there, and we're really gonna have a fight.

But they all surrendered. They knew the war was coming to an end.

Epilogue

Hartman fought in four campaigns and received a Bronze Star for heroism. Near Bastogne, the certificate says, he "volunteered to lay a communication wire and carry ammunition to isolated outposts crossing 300 yards of open terrain, under enemy machine gun and sniper fire." He also received a Purple Heart and the Belgian Fourragere, a unit award from the government of Belgium. His brother Frank also received a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart. He died in 2004. "Bench" Hartman was discharged from the Army as a communications sergeant in December 1945 and married Marjorie Mae Johns the next month. He was a builder and also worked for 16 years at Lehigh Structural Steel in Allentown. The couple had two sons, Clark and Brian. Clark died of a heart attack in 1990 at what was then Lehigh County Community College, where he taught biology. Marjorie Hartman died two years ago. "I'd like to jump again," Hartman says, "but they say you gotta go to school. I don't want to do that. I don't like school."